Day 5 Lazy Day and Firefly Night

Rainy, muggy day here in Yokohama. We've got a big weekend planned, but not really planned at all. So in order to get ready for that (figuring out transportation, cost, and what to do) I spent most of this rainy day on the computer gathering information on what to do this weekend.

My camera has a super spy zoom. It's amazing exactly how far a 21x zoom is. Here's 2 pictures for comparison. The first one is normal zoom from my hotel room (18th floor), about 3/4 of a mile away.

Here's a fully zoomed in version taken today of a group of school kids presumably on a field trip.

Here's some other super spy pictures taken from my hotel room.

I walked to this building with the CERTE on top, it's about 2 miles away from our hotel

For lunch I had another version of tsukemen. This was a soy-based broth instead of the pork based broth. Yummy, but not as good as the first tsukemen we had. This was from a place called Kookai. The soft boiled eggs are really good. They have a flavor to them, not just regular egg taste. My lunch was served with the broth, some grilled chicken and pork, cold noodles (dip them in the hot broth then eat), a Chinese style dumpling, the egg, bok choy, cabbage, and some bamboo shoots.

For dinner (sorry no picture) we grabbed some fast convenience store food; thin noodles with a curry sauce, cabbage and carrots, and some pork fried rice. We were in a hurry to get to the Sankeien Garden. It's about an hour and a half walk from our hotel, and there's really no direct route with public transportation, but the Garden closed at 9 and E didn't back from work until 6! So in order to get there in time we took the public bike rental, Bay Bike. It's just like the Citi Bike system in NYC. You register on their website, pick the port you want to take it from, choose the bike you want (they're numbered), then you'll get a passcode that you enter on the back of the bike, then off you go! We're not entirely sure that we were supposed to take the bikes as far as we did, but we didn't get in trouble for doing it. For the record, the Bay Bike website is in Japanese, and the English sections are pretty bad Engrish so it's not like I didn't check what the rules were. Anywho, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that the bikes had a moto-assist which was super helpful for the hills we had to go up to get the garden.

Now please forgive me because the pictures from the garden did not turn out very well. They're pretty blurry. But the Sankeien Garden is a truly beautiful place. It's like an ancient little town in the middle of a forest. It's mind blowing to think that every living thing was thoughtfully placed there from every lily pad in the lake to every tree. The fireflies were something special too. They fluttered about in a little creekside valley through the Japanese maple leaves. It was so relaxing to watch them light up with the sound of a bubbling creek in the distance. The fireflies themselves are different than the ones we have back in the US. Firstly they're bigger and secondly they light up a different color. I would describe ours as a neon yellow/orange color. These bugs were neon yellow/green. Even in the dark it was evident that this was a special place, and I will surely be going back in the daylight.